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The Gallery of Wearable Art

The Wig Project required 6 years, 1,431 volunteers, 1,000 shower caps, 277 rolls of film -- and only one big, curly, black wig.

Ken Solomon, a painter who lives in Brooklyn, bought the fluffy wig for $20 as part of a Halloween costume in 1998. In the years since, he has set it atop the head of just about anyone he could find, then stood them against a white background and shot them with a 35-millimeter camera.

"The wig was perfect because it was a blank slate," he said. "The variable was their face, their expression, their interpretation of 'Put on this wig and believe.' " Today, the wig is less fluffy and more gnarly (thus the shower caps beneath) but Mr. Solomon still values it.

He recruited most of his subjects by putting up fliers with the wig superimposed on everyone from van Gogh to Tony Soprano. He also solicited and photographed participants he met on the street. Despite an uncanny tolerance for repetition -- in another creative project, he sits for 10-hour intervals on various cities' subways to photograph one seat -- he said he burned out last summer.

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The culmination of the Wig Project, which is currently on display at the Josee Bienvenu Gallery in Chelsea, is a 10-minute video installation using 96 of the faces. They move and interact with one another to a two-hour loop of phone messages participants left in response to the fliers.

Several callers confide that they have a wig fetish. Some sound seductive, others confused. They want to bring their children, they want to know where they can get such a wig and they want to get paid.

The wig now resides in a drawer in Mr. Solomon's studio, where he said it would stay unless someone puts it in a museum. But nobody will ever wear it again, he said.

"It's nappy, nasty and really disgusting," he said. "I let the wig run its own life organically and said it will die. And it did." JOHANNA JAINCHILL